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“I do have to go back there,” Luca said. “I have shit to take care of, but I found what I’m looking for.”
“Please don’t say me,” Wilder begged, his throat thick with emotion. “I can’t handle that weight, Luca. I’m…I want to be enough, but I’m not.”
“You are enough, but that’s not what I meant.” Luca’s grin was a little tight, but it was also as honest as his words sounded. “You’re what I want. You were most certainly not what I was looking for, but you’re not hard to love, okay? You’re an effort, and I’m not scared of hard work.”
Wilder started to shake his head, but Luca’s grip tightened just a fraction—just enough to remind him that he was being held. “I can’t make you promises.”
“I don’t need them. My life has been full of bullshit and fake promises, and I’m not looking to corner you into a vow you’re not ready to make. I don’t know if this—if you and I—are end game, but I know this moment right here is a good start.” Luca closed his eyes and breathed out. “I think I’d like to stick around for a while. I have to go home and end all those things that were making me miserable, but I know that you’ll be back here when you can. And I’ll be waiting.”
Wilder was desperate to believe him and desperate not to, because he wasn’t sure he could take a broken promise. Not one like that. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Just say you’ll text me,” Luca told him, simple as that. His hand moved to Wilder’s cheek, thumb caressing his warm skin, then moved down to trace his lips. “Then tell me you’ll miss me, and that you’re looking forward to seeing me when you get back. And then kiss me.”
Wilder gave in and curled his hands into the front of Luca’s sweater, letting the soft fleece brush along the pads of his fingers. His eyes closed for only a second, then he nodded. “I’m going to miss you so fucking much.”
Luca smiled. “I know.”
“I can’t wait to see you when I get back.”
With a breath, Luca eased Wilder’s head back, urged his lips to part with a thumb at his chin, and Wilder leaned into him. Just like Luca had asked. It was sour from sleep, and warm, and perfect. Wilder softened, just a fraction, half-melting into the arms that held him steady. Luca indulged, but only for a moment, and then he broke off with a series of easy pecks across his bottom lip and the edge of his jaw.
“I’ll text you,” Wilder said, fulfilling that last bit of promise Luca had squeezed from him.
Luca smiled a moment, and then he let him go and walked back around to the driver’s side of the car. He didn’t wait for Wilder to get to the bakery door. He didn’t even wait for Wilder to start moving again before he pulled away from the curb and disappeared around the corner.
There had been no goodbye. None at all, and Wilder realized what it was. Luca wasn’t letting him go, even with their vague, uncertain future. He really did think Wilder was worth the effort, and that wasn’t a gift he planned to squander.
* * *
Wilder hadn’t been gone more than a few years, but it felt like a lifetime as his rental car pulled onto the long, winding dirt road that led to the property. He saw it in the distance, along the rolling fields that gave away miles of terrain. He was missing the coast like a physical ache, the sky too blue here, the horizon too damn empty, the air too dry. This wasn’t home anymore, and he had never been more profoundly aware of it.
The flight had been short, the landing rocky from summer wind. Once upon a time, this had been in his blood. He hardly noticed the way the summer air felt too light and too dry as he ran with the chickens and used every excuse he could think of to avoid going inside.
To avoid her.
His car rolled to a stop beside his sister’s little station wagon, and he took a breath before he found the courage to go in. His father’s body had already been cremated, and Willow said they were just waiting for the funeral home to secure the date of the services.
They had never been particularly religious, though his mother had grown up protestant, and his father had come from an old Spanish Catholic family—but the practices had died out a few generations before Wilder and Willow were born. In truth, his dad would have wanted something small, something spiritual. He would have wanted it outside in rain and cool weather. His father should have died during a late autumn storm and his ashes released into a creek.
Instead, they’d tell childhood stories inside a stuffy mortuary chapel, and everyone would pretend to mourn and pretend like they cared. They’d eat stale potluck food, and then his father would sit entombed in a small ceramic jar on his mother’s mantle until she died, and Willow decided what the hell she was going to do with everything left behind.
He wasn’t going to be there when his mother was finally gone. She had drained the life out of him for years, and it was only because Wilder felt like he owed his father bare bones of mourning that he’d left Savannah behind and showed up for this.
His palms were so sweaty he nearly lost grip on his suitcase, but he made it inside. It smelled the same as it always did—like baked bread and dust from the fields. The AC was blasting, just enough to take the edge off, and the floors creaked and bowed beneath his feet.
The evidence of his mother’s hatred of him was all over the walls. Each framed photograph showed not only the smiling face of his sister, but his own stark absence from family gatherings. Every single one of Willow’s mediocre accomplishments were displayed like grand trophies. She had graduated college after two extra semesters because she was too busy partying to pass her freshman year. She lost her financial aid, and it was only when her mother wrote a tuition check that her education hadn’t gone down the toilet.
She worked for a credit card company’s online support now, and made enough to fund her small apartment and her weekend drinking, not that Wilder was judging. Willow was a grown adult and lived as she saw fit, and he was happy for her. But it was a tough pill to swallow when everything he’d ever done was a failure. Every accomplishment of his own had been weighted with his hearing.
‘If you were Deaf, you’d have to work twice as hard for that,’ his mother had told him when he won third prize at the state science fair. His father showed up to the award ceremony and took a single picture, but Wilder wasn’t sure it was ever developed.
He graduated with honors, but his mother left before his name was called for him to walk across the stage. He’d signed for every choir performance she never showed up to, and he’d interpreted every parent-teacher conference she made time for only for her to spend the next three hours telling him his education by hearing teachers was a waste.
He was grateful for the Deaf community outside his home for embracing him—the little lost CODA who didn’t know what his life was meant to be or where he was supposed to stand. He was grateful to them because they were diverse, they made him feel welcome and wanted, and they showed him that his mother was just broken inside somewhere in the empty space her heart was meant to be.
It wasn’t him—it was her.
It wasn’t him—it was her.
